Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  Anders puffed up his cheeks and let out air, noisily. ‘Gibberish,’ he complained in German. ‘It makes no sense at all. “I-tem of mor-tility” – it’s all nonsense.’

  ‘All it’s saying is that a boy was born in a workhouse – something like an orphanage – in some town or other. Only, I forgot to tell you his name. It’s Oliver Twist.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well it sounds like it was written two hundred years ago,’ the boy said, sour-faced and dismissive. ‘It’s not modern,’ he added in order to settle the issue.

  ‘As a matter of fact it was written just one hundred years ago,’ Pavel started to respond, but then he broke off, shrugged, closed the book and went back to the one he had been reading before the boy arrived.

  ‘What’s it about anyway?’ Anders asked after a while, his voice feigning boredom, the feigning audible even to himself.

  ‘Words,’ said Pavel.

  ‘Words?’

  ‘Words. And a young orphan boy who starts living with an old Jew.’

  ‘Is the Jew good to him?’

  ‘No. He tries his best to squeeze him for every cent he’s worth.’

  ‘What’s his name again?’

  ‘The Jew? Fagin.’

  ‘No, I mean the boy. Olliwer?’

  ‘Oliver. Oliver Twist.’

  The boy mouthed it a few times, stretching and contracting the vowels until he chanced upon a version he liked.

  ‘You may read on,’ he said magnanimously. ‘Olliwer Tweest. Mind you, most likely I will fall asleep.’

  He left at the end of chapter four. Night had fallen, the flat was freezing. ‘Later,’ he said, and wondered whether he should tell the other boys about the books. They would want to steal them.

  The next day he came back with two tins of sardines and half a kilo of floury potatoes.

  Thereafter the boy came time and again; dropped in after breakfast, or on his way home from work. Sometimes, though not always, he would sleep there. Mostly he came to listen to the book, or else to talk. They talked about many things, Pavel and he. It took some time for Anders to get used to this. It was strange talk, talk about thoughts one had late at night before dozing off, or perhaps on the crapper sometimes, when one’s bowels made one wait and the mind started to wander. Anders had not known such thoughts were for talking. Pavel spoke of little else. When Anders asked him to tell him about normal things, say the war or his past, he declined. ‘Books, beauty, and fear of the dark,’ he said. ‘These I will talk about. Forget about the war. There was no war. Only of course there was, but we do better in forgetting.’ Whichever way he looked at it, it sounded a little meschugge to the boy.

  Then the kidneys got worse. Anders tried to buy Pavel some medicine but there was none to be had. He couldn’t tell whether Pavel was already pissing blood at that point. This was before the water had frozen in the pipes – before there was any need for the chamber pot, that is. Anders learned to gauge the disease by Pavel’s walk; by the shadow that would pass across his face and force his lips into a liar’s smile. The kidneys got worse, then better, then worse again. Once they gave occasion for one of those talks. Afterwards, Anders stayed away for a few nights, before he came back, wordlessly, and gestured for Pavel to get on with the book.

  It happened like this. They had sat up during the night, Pavel praying in one corner, a little hat in his hair and a piece of cloth stretched taut behind his back. He was speaking foreign words. When he was done he turned, holding his kidneys, his eyes moist now with pain. ‘God,’ Pavel said and the word stood in the room like a lodger overdue on his rent. It wasn’t the first time the subject had come up; it was in the book, here and there, and in the church bells that carried it in during their morning airing; in the prayers Pavel spoke each night and upon the covers of a dozen of his books, stars and crosses, and the slender sickle of a crescent moon. Anders thought it over and decided he should clarify the point.

  ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against him. He’s useful, you see. Keeps the masses in place.’ His hand made a dismissive gesture.

  ‘Who taught you this?’

  ‘Nobody taught me,’ Anders said proudly. ‘I taught myself. Or else the war taught me.’

  He mulled it over for a minute, running his tongue through a gap in his teeth. He found he liked the sound of it.

  ‘Yes, the war taught me. There is no God.’

  He looked over to Pavel, making sure he did not look like he was looking. Pavel’s face was pale, impassive. He looks like a girl, the boy thought to himself, and also like a statue.

  ‘You disapprove?’ he asked.

  ‘And what is it to you whether I approve or disapprove?’ Pavel shrugged and picked a book from a pile that sat by his bed. He began reading it in silence, the boy sitting there, gap-toothed upon his stool. They sat like that for perhaps an hour.

  ‘So there is a God?’ Anders asked at last, and flushed because his voice sounded childish in his ears.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pavel, upon reflection. ‘There may be.’

  They went back to their silence, the man reading his book, and rats scrambling in their walls.

  Later, after they had shared a tin of sardines for a midnight supper, Pavel crouched to hug the boy. He lay in his arms stiff-backed and hostile.

  ‘I am too old for this,’ he said disdainfully.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Pavel. ‘You’re old enough.’

  The boy did not understand this and thought it a lie. Outside, in the cold, he found he was crying and bitterly berated himself for it. He swore that this time he would not go back. But then, two days later, he moved in with Pavel permanently. It was the third of December. On the sixth the cold settled upon the city. A week and a half later, Boyd came to visit. And the next morning, Anders stole four leather-bound volumes from Pavel’s private library in order to get his friend some penicillin, and a lemon. He had heard it said that lemons were good when you were ill, even better than mint liqueur.

  2

  21 December 1946

  Boyd did not come back that day, the nineteenth of December, nor the next, nor the one after. Nor was there any penicillin to be had on the market. In its stead, Anders bought a fungus-ridden lemon from a sallow-faced German who claimed to run a private greenhouse – a greenhouse? How could he possibly heat it? – and some Class One meat coupons that he traded in for six pounds of innards and a plastic bucket to carry them in. The blood froze on the half-hour walk back to Pavel’s place, and he had to chip free with the ice pick whatever pieces he wanted to use that night. The thermometer had fallen to minus thirty and made each breath hurt in his chest. It had long ceased to snow, was too cold to snow, the sky scrubbed clean of cloud and germs. The house’s pipes remained frozen, of course, Anders had to fetch their water by the bucket from one of the neighbourhood pumps. On the twentieth, signs went up around the neighbourhood declaring that electricity had been limited to a few hours a day. The boy did not remember it so well, but he heard the old people grumble that it was worse than during the war. In the entranceway of the house there appeared a smeared message: ‘88’. It had showed up overnight and nobody moved to wipe it off. Anders asked Paulchen about it, and he told him the figures stood for the eighth letter, H. Double H: ‘Heil Hitler,’.

  Now that he was looking, Anders found more such eights scribbled onto doorways and courtyard walls across Charlottenburg. Once, he spotted them chalked onto the green canvas of a British Army truck. That night, stretched out next to Pavel’s feverish form, Anders lay awake asking himself whether there was any truth in the rumour that Hitler had survived the invasion and that his Reich would rise once more from its ashes. He got up, cut a piece of ice from out of the bucket, slipped it into his mouth. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he whispered past the ice’s ragged edges, just to try it out, then shrugged his shoulders. It was all the same to him, just as long as Pavel made it through the night.

  The fever was getting worse. Anders had
no way of taking Pavel’s temperature, but in the cold of the room he watched steam rise from the exposed skin of his cheeks and piled blanket after blanket on top of him. The coal oven burned night and day, but its heat lacked the strength to traverse the room. It was, to Anders, like they were burning money; coal prices soared, rumours of people freezing to death in their beds. Paulchen made Schlo’ and some of the other small-framed boys creep down coal shafts at night to score a few buckets’ worth, then distributed it amongst his crew. They swore unending devotion. Those who had families supplied fathers, mothers, rape-pregnant sisters. The others heated their cubbyholes and traded the excess for chocolate and smokes. Anders brought his coals home to Pavel, sat inches before the iron stove, stoking the fire and beseeching it to break through the wall of cold that grew out of the floor a mere two yards from it. Coal fumes hung so heavy in the room that the sick man’s face was mucky with soot. Five times a day Anders made a point of breaking off a corner of ice, clutching it in an oven-warmed fist, and pressing it to Pavel’s lips. Water revived Pavel, bade him wake. They spoke on and off, boy and man, never mentioning the midget. Pavel tried to read but had to give up. His eyeballs looked swollen in their sockets; they could not focus. Anders watched him for hours at a time and thought that surely he would die.

  ‘Tonight,’ he whispered into a soot-covered ear, mentally sorting through the contents of his bucket of meat. ‘Tonight I will cook you a good dinner.

  ‘Meat,’ he whispered. ‘Meat for health. It will make you good again.’

  His hand crawled over Pavel’s dry-hot cheek and when it crossed his lips he saw them pucker. Anders did not feel the kiss. It was parched and dry and had no strength.

  Pavel dreamt. Day and night, always the same dream now. Him, naked, rolling upon a mountain of raw kidneys. Rolling in the manner of a swine, naked, the smell of kidneys strong in his nose. His naked body: writhing, and on occasion the heavens would open, more kidneys raining down on him, sticking to him, cold and clammy meat on skin. Whenever he woke, he told himself that it was nothing but the fever.

  Then, early one evening, he woke yet again from his dream and found them on his dresser. He was convinced, then, that they were his own, and in truth he felt relieved. They lay upon a plate, the last of his china, at the very centre of the dresser. Lay within a circle of blood upon a plate of chipped Meissen, a pinch of dried rosemary scattered across. Pavel lay still, his eyes fastened upon the kidneys, hysterical laughter sounding in the depths of him. He tried to move and felt unbearably heavy. A pile of blankets pressed down upon his body; he had to fight to free an arm and a hand, and dug his nails into his palm to test it for sensation. Deliberately – tenderly – he reached out towards the plate. He wished to know whether they were still warm, those kidneys that had been taken from him during his sleep. He found them freezing, a coat of frost crystals clinging to their membranes. The rosemary stuck to his sweaty fingers. He brought it back to his nose and through it he smelled the tangy smell of kidney. It was then that the laughter burst free of his chest and he began to flail and kick against the blankets’ leaden weight.

  It went on so until the boy was there, shouting at him. The Meissen lay smashed on the floor; the blankets were bloodied. ‘Meat,’ the boy kept screaming at him, and at long last Pavel relented. He settled back into sleep, thinking that it did not matter now, without kidneys, thinking I should’ve sold my books, thinking I am dead now, because I was too proud to sell them, trying to weep for himself, asleep again before any tears would come to him, asleep upon a mountain of kidneys, writhing.

  Anders woke up to his laughing, watched him kick and flail. One arm hit the dresser. The plate that he had laid out in order to cheer him up sailed down, cracked right down its middle; the meat bounced hard like a stone. The boy leapt on top of him, held him down. Marvelled at how weak he was, a grown man, his palms and cheek stained by the meat. It did not take long to calm him. Pavel slipped into sleep like a toddler, lay oblivious as Anders rearranged the blankets and cleaned his face with a moistened towel. He picked up the dinner from off the floor and went to see whether the electricity had been turned on yet. It had, and he hastily melted a piece of lard in Pavel’s cast-iron pan, then patiently fried both pieces of meat until they were done. They took their while getting tender on account of being frozen, and by the time Anders was finished the outsides were scorched, the centres still bloody. He cut them into bite-sized chunks with a pen knife, shoved them into an army-issue bowl and carried it back into the sick room. The boy’s entreaties woke Pavel quickly enough, but try as he might he could not get him to chew the meat. He would just lie there, a piece between his lips, and suck on its warmth. In the end Anders ate most of the kidneys himself, thinking that it had been a long time since he had tasted meat this good. Pavel had already gone back to sleep. After dinner Anders sat in the light of a candle, watching his friend die.

  Anders struggled against it for the longest time. He sat on a stool by the bed clutching his knees and bravely fighting the impulse. Whenever his hands threatened to join up, or he found his eyes casting about for a towel or shawl, he would jump up and pace the room instead. The tears were in his throat but not yet on his face. When he finally relented and slipped on a cap as he had watched Pavel do, he did so with bitterness. The wood felt hard under his knees, and there was something ridiculous about the tea towel that he held stretched out behind the back of his head. Anders prayed.

  ‘God,’ he prayed, ‘I think you’re mean.’

  ‘Mean, you hear. What sort of God would kill a man like this?’

  ‘God,’ he prayed, ‘if he lives, I promise to believe.’

  ‘If he dies,’ he prayed, ‘I will curse you.’

  ‘Curse you, you hear.’

  ‘My name is Anders,’ he added, ‘and this here is Pavel,’ lest there be any mistakes.

  He stopped praying then, lost for words, and grief took hold of him like a rabid dog. He sobbed and lay a cheek upon the icy floor. It took his breath, literally, and for a moment he tried to still body and blood so that he might better hear. It was to him as though, above, at the precise moment when his ear had touched the wood, he had heard a piano burst into song. He did not dare move for a whole minute and then another, sat out ten, with his breath screwed into him, biting his lip against the cold. Then he leapt up, slid a sleeve across his tearstained face, and ran as fast as he could up the stairs to the apartment directly above.

  He burst in, not bothering to knock. She must have forgotten to lock the door behind her, it gave way to his childish fist and he stormed in, kicking up clouds of dust. He bolted down the corridor, she heard him crash into her suitcase, and on towards the light. The drumbeat of his feet upon her carpets – she stopped her playing in surprise, craned her neck to see, and no sooner had she done so than he, too, stopped with great suddenness, his legs still stretched for running, and stood stock still at the very centre of her living room. She picked up the candelabra from where it stood next to the piano chair and rose to inspect him.

  He was an ugly boy, physically stunted, twelve, perhaps thirteen years old. In figure short and angular; a prune face above, with crooked teeth and eyes that didn’t sit quite even, like he had broken a bone there some time ago and it had never been set. He opened his mouth to speak but not a word came out.

  ‘What?’ she asked, and noted how cold it sounded. ‘What do you want?’

  He rubbed his eyes, the dust must have got to them, his voice rasped in his throat.

  ‘What?’ she asked again, disentangling her coat from the chair, and prepared herself to use the candelabra as a weapon if need be. The boy did not answer, so she raised her left and used it to point into the black of the corridor.

  ‘Then go,’ she said, one eye on her jewelled wristwatch. ‘Go, or you’ll get into trouble.’

  The boy would not leave. Instead, he leapt at her, or rather at her hand. Initially she thought he was after the watch, the little thief, but it was the hand itself
that he grabbed and applied his weight to.

  ‘Please,’ he mouthed, just as she had resolved to hit him with the candelabra. His eyes were on the floor. ‘Please.’

  He smelled of street waste and burnt meat.

  ‘What do you want?’ she tried again, the boy still clinging to her hand. His prune face quivered, he was ugly like a monkey, and spat when he talked, unmodulated, too loud for the room and the hour.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘My friend, he is ill. You – you have a piano. You are rich. Please. Save him. He is dying.’

  It sounded made up, a trap perhaps, and she longed to get back to her playing. It had been so long since she had enjoyed the pleasures of a piano.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she told him, and then, ‘Let me go, you little beast,’ only his grimy fingers were clamped upon her jacket now, pulling at it and threatening to pop its buttons. A boot-tip to his crotch got him away from her, gave her the time to sink a fist into his hair and drag him to the door. She was too fast for his flailing leg and slammed the door in his face. Then she stood, panting, and waited for him to go away.

  He didn’t.

  Instead he drummed against the wood with feet and fists, threatening to wake up the whole house. ‘Please,’ he screamed, his voice breaking, and through the closed door she pictured spit flying from his crooked mouth. The fool. The Colonel would be back soon. She did not want to think what he might do to the boy. In truth she could not predict it.

  ‘Boy,’ she hissed through the wood. ‘Be quiet. For your own sake, be quiet.’

  The drumming stopped. She heard him shift.

  ‘Please.’ It sounded from the crack underneath the door. Half a dirty pinky squeezed its way into her apartment. ‘He’s sick.’